Tijs Michiel Verwest, alias DJ Tiesto, was boopern on the 17th of January 1969 in Breda, Holland. He first started spinning records when he was 14 years old. At the age of 15, he made mix-tapes with the best tunes of the month, gave them to friends and clothing stores. A year later he had bought his own mobile and played at small student parties. His next step was a Dutch club called De Lente. There, Tiesto entertained the crowd with disco, hip hop and early house-music. When Tiesto was 21 years old, he started playing in The Spock, where only house-music was played every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, and at the age of 22 he also mixed for Channel X, an illegal radio station that broad-casted house music 24 hours a day and that was very popular especially in Holland and Belgium. Tiesto also played in a famous after-club in Amsterdam that year, called the Voodoo Club. Before his 24th birthday, he had only played club music, but the years following to it, Tijs Verwest also played and produced hardcore-music which was very popular in Club X, Belgium. In his free time he went to famous Belgium clubs to listen what the sound was over there. It was in these clubs that he first discovered the great magic of trance music. He started to experiment with these new sounds in The Spock, and soon he was discovered by Arny Bink, the label-manager of Basic Beat Recordings , Rotterdam. Together they compiled the CD Forbidden Paradise 3 – The Quest For Atlantis. This was the first Basic Beat compilation to hit the 8.000 sales point, and it’s still selling as you read. In that same period Tiesto started to assemble his own studio and began to make his own tunes and records. What started out as a small project has now awarded him with several massive club hits, which are played all over the world. Now he’s 34 years old and he has sold hundred thousands of copies of his mixed albums all over the world. He has also played in almost every big club in Holland, big parties like Luna Park, Digital Overdose, Mega-rave, Inner City, Sensation and Dance Valley, and also abroad, in the U.K. The End, Gatecrasher, Gods-kitchen, Passion, Hungary Flort, Belgium La Rocca, Illusion, Luxembourg, Germany, Malaysia, US, Canada, Australia and even Japan.